Friday, February 26, 2016

If you didn't catch the live debate about the Holyrood voting system between myself and Tommy Sheridan earlier, it's available to watch at your leisure HERE.

The rest of my evening has been dominated by Eurovision and rugby. I am absolutely dumbfounded by the public's choice for the UK's Eurovision entry. Just for once, I had been totally relaxed about the outcome - there was no John Barrowman on the "experts' panel" steering the public towards the wrong decision, and yet somehow they managed to screw it up all by themselves. I can only assume it was a young female audience voting for good-looking guys, regardless of the song.

I don't think Bianca's song (which was so obviously the best of the six, it was almost painful) was quite a Eurovision winner, but with good staging it might have had an outside chance. Ah well. At least nobody will have to worry about success at Eurovision influencing the EU referendum one way or the other!

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Just a quick note to let you know that if everything goes according to plan (and obviously I'll let you know if it doesn't), you'll be able to watch a live-stream of an Independence Live debate between myself and Tommy Sheridan on Friday at 6.45pm. The topic, you won't be surprised to hear, will be so-called "tactical voting" on the Holyrood regional list.

I've attempted to embed the live-stream below, but if that doesn't work it'll be available to watch HERE.

The first referendum poll to be conducted after the Brussels agreement on Friday night wasn't terribly helpful, because it was the first in a new series of telephone polls from Survation, meaning there were no baseline figures to work from. The second and third post-deal polls out tonight are more useful, although they actually point towards slightly contradictory conclusions on the trend. And, as you might well expect in the Alice in Wonderland world of EU referendum polling, the ComRes poll showing Remain in a 12-point lead is actually more encouraging for the Leave side than the YouGov poll showing a single-point Leave lead.

The reason? ComRes conducted their poll by telephone, and it's extremely unusual for a telephone poll to produce a Remain lead as low as 12 points. In fact, over the last few months there has only been one other phone poll that showed a Remain lead of lower than 15 points, and that was the most recent ComRes poll from earlier this month. So we do now have one phone pollster that is pointing in successive polls to at least a moderate narrowing of the gap since the shape of the deal began to become known. Ipsos-Mori have so far failed to corroborate that trend, but there has only been one recent Ipsos-Mori poll, so it's possible it will still happen.

The online YouGov poll is less encouraging for Leave because it shows the state of play firmly back into the 'normal range' for online pollsters, after a brief period when it looked like Leave had achieved a telling swing on the back of the reaction against the emerging deal. The last two online ICM polls have also shown a return to business as usual, and that's probably not a coincidence. So we could - and it's still only a possibility - be starting to see an indyref-style convergence between telephone and online polls, with the Remain lead drifting downwards in the telephone polls, while the online polls show a broadly static position.

There's a new article on the YouGov website suggesting that the massive divergence between telephone and online polls can be mostly explained by the reluctance of some people to admit to a telephone interviewer that they are undecided, and their inclination to instead opt for the easy answer of saying they support the status quo. That's just speculation, but it is consistent with the fact that there are significantly fewer Don't Knows in telephone polls (which is the complete opposite of what you'd normally expect). If there's any truth in that theory, it means the sizeable Remain lead in phone polls could be quite soft, and it also means there's no reason to suppose that online and phone polls will show the same trend over the remainder of the campaign - a dramatic convergence could be on the cards as the 'knee-jerk Remains' among telephone respondents start to give more considered answers. We may be starting to see the very early signs of that.

* * *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 45.9% (-0.8)
Leave 38.8% (-0.4)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 40.0% (-1.4)
Leave 40.7% (-1.2)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 51.8% (-0.2)
Leave 36.8% (+0.4)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last month. The online average is based on ten polls - five from ICM, three from YouGov, one from BMG and one from TNS. The telephone average is based on six polls - three from ComRes, two from Ipsos-Mori and one from Survation.)

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Although pro-independence people on social media have appeared to be united in their reaction to the UK government's intransigence over the fiscal framework, I think there's actually been a subtle divide. The largest group always quite fancied the idea of the Scotland Bill being vetoed and were only too delighted that London seemed to be handing the Scottish Government a good reason for doing that. A smaller group wanted the extra powers in the Scotland Bill, and considered it a matter of extreme regret that London were sabotaging the whole process and leaving Holyrood with little option but to veto. I was part of the latter group, and I'm therefore delighted that a fair deal has been belatedly reached.

The Yes campaign was by any standards an extraordinary phenomenon - and yet its only concrete achievement was the Smith package. (I know some people would say the SNP landslide was also a direct result of the Yes campaign, and that's true, but election results are ephemeral.) If the new powers had never materialised, there was a danger that we could have ended up looking back at the 2014 referendum as an event that ultimately achieved absolutely nothing - which is pretty much how the sovereignty movement in Quebec look back at their near miss in 1995.

It may well be that the UK government honestly thinks that more devolution is in itself a trap for the SNP - but they're wrong, just as every previous UK government transferring powers as a "brilliant tactic" has been proved wrong. Consider this, for example - how much harder is it going to be for the BBC to resist the case for a Scottish Six now that income tax rates will be entirely set in Scotland? How can a one-size-fits-all "national" news programme broadcast from London possibly cope with that degree of asymmetric devolution?

Monday, February 22, 2016

I'm getting the slight impression that the outgoing Mayor of London may have read one too many of those endless "Scottish public opinion is basically the same as English public opinion" articles from his mate Fraser Nelson. I can't think of any other explanation for this utterly bizarre claim in his long-awaited Telegraph column last night -
"I also accept there is a risk that a vote to Leave the EU, as it currently stands, will cause fresh tensions in the union between England and Scotland. On the other hand, most of the evidence I have seen suggests that the Scots will vote on roughly the same lines as the English."

Luckily for all of us, the evidence on this subject is publicly available, and to state the bleedin' obvious, "most" of it does not suggest that Scotland is in line with English public opinion. In fact, absolutely all of it suggests the complete opposite.

SCOTLAND : AVERAGE OF LAST THREE ONLINE POLLSRemain 53.7%Leave 28.3%BRITAIN-WIDE : AVERAGE OF LAST THREE ONLINE POLLSRemain 40.0%Leave 40.0%Remain lead in Scotland is 25.4%Remain lead across Britain is 0.0%Remain lead in Scotland is 25.4% higher than in Britain as a whole

* * *

SCOTLAND : AVERAGE OF LAST THREE TELEPHONE/FACE-TO-FACE POLLSRemain 57.0%Leave 23.0%BRITAIN-WIDE : AVERAGE OF LAST THREE TELEPHONE/FACE-TO-FACE POLLSRemain 50.3%Leave 36.7%Remain lead in Scotland is 34.0%Remain lead across Britain is 13.6%Remain lead in Scotland is 20.4% higher than in Britain as a whole

* * *

Now, to be fair, full-scale EU referendum polls are conducted less frequently in Scotland than across Britain, so the above numbers aren't directly comparable - some of the Scottish fieldwork is quite a bit older, which might potentially give a distorted impression. But that's where the Scottish subsamples of Britain-wide polls come in so handy...

Ipsos-Mori telephone poll (13th-16th February) :

Across Britain, the Remain lead was 18%

In Scotland, the Remain lead was 57%
Remain lead in Scotland was 39% higher than in Britain as a whole

* * *

TNS online poll (11th-15th February) :

Across Britain, the Leave lead was 3%

In Scotland, the Remain lead was 25%

Remain lead in Scotland was 28% higher than in Britain as a whole

* * *

ICM online poll (12th-14th February) :

Across Britain, the Remain lead was 4%

In Scotland, the Remain lead was 19%

Remain lead in Scotland was 15% higher than in Britain as a whole

* * *

ComRes telephone poll (11th-14th February) :

Across Britain, the Remain lead was 8%

In Scotland, the Remain lead was 28%

Remain lead in Scotland was 20% higher than in Britain as a whole
* * *

On and on it goes. Heaven only knows what "most of the evidence" is showing on Planet Boris, but back here in the real world it's pointing in one direction only. There are two realistic outcomes - either a) Britain will vote to Remain, and Scotland will vote to Remain by a much bigger margin, or b) Britain will vote to Leave, and Scotland will vote to Remain. We all know what the likely consequences of the latter would be.

* * *

Many thanks to the 577 people who voted in this blog's readers' poll yesterday. 87.7% of you want the UK to remain in the EU, while 12.3% of you want to leave. That's almost identical to the result of the previous poll a few months ago (although the Remain lead has grown very slightly).

Sunday, February 21, 2016

A few months ago, I posed the EU referendum question in a readers' poll, and was quite startled that there was an overwhelming vote (in the region of 85% to 15%) in favour of Remain. Perhaps that shouldn't have been a surprise on a pro-independence blog, but I had asked a similar question back in 2011 (albeit when the blog had far fewer readers) and found a narrow majority were in favour of leaving the EU and rejoining EFTA instead.

I thought it might be interesting to repeat the exercise, because we now know the package we'll be voting on, the date of the referendum, the Rogue's Gallery of Tories that will be lining up on both sides, and there's also been a long-overdue discussion about the fact that an unintentional side-effect of Brexit would be a substantial and more-or-less automatic increase in the Scottish Parliament's powers.

You can find the voting form at the top of the sidebar (desktop version of the site only), and the poll will close overnight.

The first EU referendum poll conducted since the Brussels deal was finalised on Friday night has already been released, and strangely it's not all that helpful. It's a Survation telephone poll, and as Survation haven't previously conducted any telephone polls during the campaign, it's impossible to reach any firm conclusions about whether Remain or Leave have made any progress as a result of the agreement, or whether the effect has been neutral. We're also not really any closer to solving the mystery of the sudden and unexpected divergence between the telephone findings of Ipsos-Mori and ComRes. The most that can be said is that if the 'house effect' of telephone polling by Survation is roughly the same as that of telephone polling by Ipsos-Mori and ComRes, and if the agreement on Friday has had little impact on public opinion (two very big ifs), then the new poll might lend some weight to my theory that Ipsos-Mori and ComRes diverged mainly because of very extreme sampling variation, and that if they had repeated the exercise immediately afterwards they would probably both have produced results somewhere in between the two extremes.

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? (Survation, telephone)

Remain 47.6%
Leave 33.2%

With Don't Knows excluded, that's a 59-41 lead for Remain, which is roughly similar to the advantage the Better Together campaign enjoyed among the three No-friendly pollsters with a few weeks to go until the independence referendum. The important difference with 2014, of course, is that the Leave campaign already have a small outright lead in the polls that tend to be most favourable for them (ie. online polls).

The oddest feature of the Survation datasets is that Wales, not Scotland, is the region of the UK with the biggest Remain lead. That doesn't tally up with the polling evidence we've already seen that suggests public opinion on the EU in Wales is roughly the same as in England. OK, freakish subsamples can even themselves out within a poll, but the fact that the raw Welsh sample has had to be sharply upweighted from 34 to 63 isn't ideal. It's not impossible that the sampling issues in Wales may have led to the overall Remain lead being slightly overstated.

If the rumours that Boris Johnson will declare for Leave today are true, Survation's figures will soon look out of date anyway, and we'll start looking ahead to the first post-Boris poll. I know that very few people who read this blog rate the guy, but if he actually fronts the campaign and represents it in high-profile TV debates, I think that could make a huge difference and potentially swing the balance. Apart from charisma, he brings a bit of optimism and sunshine to the table - the six Tory cabinet ministers who came out for Leave yesterday look like such a dreary bunch in comparison.

* * *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLSShould the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :Remain 46.7% (-0.8)Leave 39.2% (-0.7)ONLINE AVERAGE :Remain 41.4% (-0.6)Leave 41.9% (-0.5)TELEPHONE AVERAGE :Remain 52.0% (-1.0)Leave 36.4% (-0.9)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last month. The online average is based on nine polls - four from ICM, two from YouGov, one from BMG, one from ORB and one from TNS. The telephone average is based on five polls - two from ComRes, two from Ipsos-Mori and one from Survation.)